Twitter rival Bluesky, a decentralized social app conceptualized by Twitter former CEO Jack Dorsey, disclosed it experienced a high rate of sign-ups after Elon Musk set limits to users’ engagements.
Bluesky, which is still in the invite-only beta phase, had to temporarily pause sign-ups on the platform to resolve the existing performance issues as a result of record-high traffic.
The company wrote via a post, “We will temporarily be pausing Bluesky sign-ups while our team continues to resolve the existing performance issues. We will keep you updated when the invite code will resume functionality”.
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The Twitter-like app witnessed a high influx of users on its platform on Saturday after Musk wrote via a tweet that due to extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation, verified accounts, unverified accounts, and the new unverified accounts will be subject to different limits on the social media site.
This saw more than 7,500 Twitter users report problems using the micro-blogging platform, as some hashtags such as “TwitterDown”, and “GBTwitter” trended on the platform, following the newly implemented tweet engagements limits.
Musk’s new feature didn’t sit well with so many Twitter users which saw several of them turn to Twitter-like apps like Mastodon and Bluesky.
According to app intelligence firm data.ai in March, it discoosed that Bluesky, which debuted on February 17, 2023, had seen over 2,000 downloads in the testing phase, and had about 1.2 million people on its waiting list.
The app, now a public benefit company, had originally been incubated within Twitter starting in 2019 when Jack Dorsey served as CEO. Twitter also provided its financial backing for years. Though its founding was well ahead of the company’s sale to current owner Elon Musk, the two execs more recently had discussed the idea of an open-source protocol over text messages ahead of Musk’s Twitter acquisition.
After leaving Twitter, Dorsey spoke about Bluesky, describing it as an open decentralized standard for social media. In October last year, he posted on Twitter that Bluesky intends to be a competitor to any company trying to own the underlying fundamentals for social media or the data of the people using it.
The app offers a simplified user interface that has similar and enhanced features to that of Twitter. Although the Bluesky app has many similarities to Twitter, its key difference is that it is organized around a decentralized system.
That means user data can be stored on independent servers rather than ones owned by the company, and in the future, users will be able to develop their servers that they can use with communities of their choosing.
Bluesky has become the latest platform to be described as a potential Twitter replacement for some, since Elon Musk takeover of the social media app.
It is not far-fetched to say that once Bluesky is fully launched, it could rival Twitter, as Musk’s constant revamps on the social media platform have seen users continue to search for alternative platforms.